Nobody noticed. Not then. Not now, and that started way earlier than you think.
Adjacent. Not rejected. Not included. Just never quite in it, do you feel that? and what if that's okay.
I've been writing this in my head for years. I just didn't have a name for it until I just named it for myself.
I am the permanent peripheral person.
That's me, and if you're reading this and nodding because something in that phrase already feels familiar, it might be you too, welcome to my club!
I have always been on the edge. School, work, family. All of it. Sound familiar?
Primary school. Secondary school. Work. Friendship groups. Family. All of it. Not bullied. Not ostracised in the obvious, dramatic way. Just... adjacent. Present but not quite counted. There at the table but not really part of the meal.
I was never the cool kid. I was also never the kid getting picked on. I was the kid who could sometimes access the good stuff, drift in and out of different groups, and never fully belong to any of them. At the time I probably told myself that was flexibility. Freedom, even.
It wasn't. It was the beginning of a pattern I've been living ever since.
Does any of that sound like yours?
My name wasn't on the list. The moment I stopped explaining it away.
Recently I went to an event. One of the other guests there had sat opposite me in my own home. We'd been in the same room for hours. At the event, they walked straight past me. No recognition. No acknowledgement. Nothing.
I picked up the delegate list from the bag. My name wasn't on it.
I left not long after.
That's a small thing, right? A logistical error. A distracted person. Easy to explain away. But it wasn't small to me because it wasn't isolated. It was just the latest in a very long line of the same moment playing out differently dressed.
I've done the showing up. I've won two television shows for goodness sake. Years of showing up, contributing, being present. And still, somehow, not registering. Still peripheral. Compare that to a theatre event I went to around the same time, where I felt genuinely seen. Genuinely in it. The contrast was so sharp and I n noticed it.
How many times have you explained away your own version of this moment?
Is this just me? No. And the science is pretty brutal about it.
I do ponder this a lot, is it me, ask my therapist! It is not just me.
Dr Kipling Williams, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, spent decades researching what he called ostracism: being ignored and excluded by others who are right there in your presence. His landmark paper in the Annual Review of Psychology (2007) found that even brief episodes of being ignored produce sadness, anger and a fundamental threat to four core psychological needs: belonging, self-esteem, control and meaningful existence.¹
Meaningful existence. That phrase.
Williams found that chronic exposure to this kind of exclusion doesn't just hurt in the moment. Over time it depletes your coping resources and can result in depression, helplessness and what he called alienation.² The silent treatment, the blank stare, the name not on the list. These aren't minor social awkwardnesses. They register in the body as a genuine threat.
Which brings me to the lovely brain. stuff, the neuroscience. Dr Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA ran fMRI studies where participants played a virtual ball-tossing game, only to be gradually excluded by the other players. What she found was that social exclusion activated the same neural regions as physical pain, specifically the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula.³ The brain processes being left out the same way it processes being hurt.
Her work was described by the American Psychological Association as "a landmark finding in social neuroscience."⁴ When she talks about it publicly she says: *"It's not just in your head. It's in your brain. There is something biological going on that is interpreting the pain of social rejection as something that really is a painful experience."*⁵
I could see myself in that. Not as a revelation, just as a recognition. Oh. There it is. That's the thing.
So when I stood at that event and felt something I can only describe as a small collapse inside me, that was real. That was my nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do.
And yours is too.
Needing to belong is not weakness. It is biology. So why are we still apologising for it?
Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary published one of psychology's most cited papers in 1995, The Need to Belong in Psychological Bulletin. They reviewed hundreds of studies and concluded that the need to form and maintain meaningful social bonds isn't a preference or a sensitivity. It's a fundamental human motivation, as basic as hunger or thirst.⁶
Not every person has the same intensity of this need. But the need is universal. Which means the pain of it not being met is universal too.
What Baumeister and Leary also found is that when this need goes chronically unmet, when you're always there but never fully in, the effects compound. Emotional patterns shift. Cognitive processes change. Health is affected. The body keeps score of social exclusion just as it keeps score of everything else.⁶
What we don’t talk about enough about : you can be surrounded by people and still be experiencing this. It's not about physical aloneness. It's about the quality of being seen.
I am now not apologising for needing that. Are you?
What do you call being there but not counting? There's actually a name for it.
There's a concept in the research called Perceived Partial Social Belonging: the state of being present in a group or community without feeling fully integrated into it.⁷ Researchers have found it is genuinely distressing precisely because it sits in an ambiguous middle ground.
You're not excluded. You're not included. You're on the edge.
That's my entire social biography in one academic concept.
Online communities where messages go unanswered. Group chats that don't reply. Applications to join things that get quietly ignored. Attempts to connect that dissolve into nothing. I've lived all of it. And the research says the ambiguity of partial belonging is in some ways harder to process than clear rejection, because there's no clean signal to respond to. You're left wondering if it's you.
Spoiler: it almost always is not you. But that's not what the brain tells you at 2am, is it?
Being blanked online hits the same as being blanked in person. The research confirms it. Did you need that validating?
Being ignored online isn't a lesser version of being ignored in person. The research is consistent and current on this. A 2025 study by Büttner and Greifeneder published in Current Psychology tracked everyday ostracism experiences across both online and offline contexts and found the emotional fallout is equivalent: the same threat to belonging, the same hit to self-esteem, the same mood drop whether you were blanked at an event or your message disappeared into nothing.⁸ Albath and colleagues, also 2025, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, linked repeated online ostracism directly to depression and anxiety. Not as a risk factor. As an outcome.⁸
I'm not an influencer. I'm not building for virality or follower counts. But I am a person who shows up online, creates things, shares things, builds things, and regularly watches those things land in silence. And that silence has its own feeling. It's different from just not being popular. It's the sending-into-a-void feeling. The putting-yourself-out-there and hearing nothing back.
Social pain, Eisenberger found, also has a peculiar quality that physical pain does not. It can be re-experienced. Relived. A broken bone heals and the pain does not return when you think about it. But social rejection, the moment someone walked past you, the name missing from the list, can replay with full emotional charge years later.⁹ Every new instance triggers the ones before it.
That's why the event felt so heavy. It wasn't right for me.
Have you done that thing too, want to fit in and not want too as well?
It started at home. That part matters more than I wanted to admit.
I haven't talked publicly about this much because it's personal and it took years to accept. This is not a criticism of anyone. As someone who has been deleted through estrangement from those closest to me, it affects me deeply, and I will always accept my role in it too. Blame, shame, guilt, disconnection. I have always it seems been easy to remove and delete.
The pattern didn't start at school. It started at home. I was easy to miss in my family too. Not recognised as significant. Easy to delete from the narrative. And what the research shows, Eisenberger's work in particular, is that early experiences of social exclusion shape how the nervous system responds to later ones.³ When your baseline is peripheral, peripheral becomes familiar. Not comfortable. Familiar. Patterns form in all of us.
And then you spend adulthood wondering why you pour everything into the one relationship where you are seen. In my case, Dave. Because that relationship becomes the entire weight-bearing wall of your sense of mattering. When that has pressure on it, everything wobbles.
I say this not for sympathy. I say it because I think a lot of people reading this will recognise something of themselves in this. Does it start earlier than you've admitted?
And while we're on the subject of assumptions and what we think we know about the people closest to us, I've been reading Dawn French's Enough. It's about a woman who gathers her family to tell them today is her last day alive, and the 24 hours that follow. It sounds like it should be morbid. It isn't. What it is, is a razor-sharp study in how spectacularly wrong we are about what the people we love actually need from us, and how rarely we ask. I won't say more than that. Just read it. Then ring someone (If you want, I didn’t!)
And then some nights you feel completely in it. So what is that telling you?
When I am seen, those are magical moments. They do happen and I work hard to make sure I don't miss them now. I savour them and I keep coming back to them.
The theatre night was real. The moments of genuine connection are real. There are situations I walk into and something just... works. People who see me immediately. Conversations that don't require me to justify my presence.
It's also there in the purity of moments with my grandchildren. Their words. And I now reflect back on those magical moments I missed earlier with my children, didn't absorb, didn't recognise in their raw state. Truly missed. I'm sure psychologically there is a consequence to that, and it's part of the reckoning I'm in right now, including how I've made others feel too.
I've just finished Matt Haig's The Midnight Train and go read it. It's about an 81-year-old man riding a train back through the moments of his life, watching himself miss the ones that mattered. Not the big events. The glances. The words said quietly. The touch that passed unremarked. He's not allowed to intervene. He can only watch. And the book asks, with devastating patience, whether any of us actually register the moments we're in or whether we're too busy performing being there to notice we've left. Bit close to home, that one. I read it in approximately two sittings and then sat very still for a while.
So it's not that I'm universally invisible. There are conditions under which I am fully in it. Small groups. Deep conversation. Something to learn or unpick together. The dinner table over the networking event. Depth over volume.
I've spent a lot of my life attempting to make the wrong situations work. And then feeling like something is wrong with me when I stay peripheral in them.
What if nothing is wrong with you either? What if you've just been in the wrong places?
Why do I keep going back to the same situations and expecting something different?
Here's something I've only recently got honest, well acceptance about. As an adult I keep putting myself into situations I don't fully understand why I'm in them, and then I realise, usually too late, that I've been testing myself. Again.
This week was one of those days. The same event, second time, different location, and it felt just as difficult as the first time.
So why did I go? Was it FOMO? Was it that persistent pull towards external recognition, the hope that this time the crowd would register me? Then arriving and realising, again, that external recognition from that kind of gathering isn't actually what I want at all.
I think I've been confusing two things. The desire to be seen, which is real and human and backed by decades of neuroscience, and the specific places I've been looking for it. Loud gatherings. Events built for volume. I keep testing them as if one day they'll work differently. They don't. That's not a failure of the format or of me. It's just information I keep refusing to receive.
The truth, when I sit with it, is straightforward. Intimate small groups work for me. I genuinely enjoy them. One to one conversation. Group workshops. Mini gatherings where there's something real to talk about. That's where I'm actually present, actually contributing, actually connected.
I need to stop pushing myself to fit into situations I don't enjoy. Not because I'm avoiding challenge or difference. Actually the opposite is true. I crave difference. I crave depth and real exchange. What I don't crave is groupthink, the influencer pick-me energy, the performance of just being there.
I'll keep pushing my own edges because that matters. But I'm done running the same test and expecting a different result. I'll do my "it's me, your periphery friend" WhatsApp messages, show up where I'm genuinely wanted, and hold the boundary of my own format without apology. That works for them and for me.
Are you still testing situations that have already given you their answer?
I don't need smooth. I need different. And it turns out that's not a problem, it's a preference.
I've finally understood about those groups I kept joining and then quietly detaching from I have done them all book groups. Interiors communities. Cooking circles. Industry networks. Professional peer groups. I kept putting myself in them because it felt like what you're supposed to do. That's how you find your people, right? Join things. Show up. Find your tribe. It's practically a cultural instruction.
Except every time I got into those spaces I felt less energised, not more. Not excluded exactly. More like unstimulated. Like I'd sat down at a table where everyone was eating the same meal I didn't order and wondering why I wasn't hungry.
What I've worked out is this: I was confusing the idea of belonging with the experience of conformity.
Those groups, the ones built around shared taste, shared identity, shared profession, they function by agreement. The house aesthetic everyone loves. The books the group approves of. The industry opinions everyone quietly aligns around. That's not community for me. That's a performance of sameness, and it has a name.
You have heard groupthink, well Irving Janis, psychologist at Yale, coined that term in 1972 to describe what happens when a group's desire for unanimity overrides honest thinking. His research found that pressures for conformity restrict the thinking of a group, bias its analysis, and stifle individual creative thought.¹⁰ The more cohesive and homogeneous the group, the more this happens. You self-censor. You calibrate yourself to the crowd. You tone yourself down to fit. I have never seen it as groupthink as I was working that out more of a nodding head style thing, yet now I read and see what it really is.
I've been doing that in every clique-adjacent situation I've walked into, and then wondered why I feel so flat afterwards.
What actually lights me up is the opposite. Different skills, different knowledge, different experiences different frames of reference around the same table. Real friction, the kind that comes from people who genuinely don't all think the same thing. That's where I come alive.
Scott Page, professor at the University of Michigan, spent years building the research case for exactly this. His book The Diversity Bonus presents evidence across economics, psychology and computer science that groups made up of different kinds of thinkers consistently outperform homogeneous ones on complex tasks.¹¹ The bonuses he documents are improved problem solving, more accurate predictions and greater innovation. Diversity of thought, he argues, isn't just morally preferable. It is functionally superior.
For me that's not just an organisational insight. It's a self-knowledge one.
I don't thrive in circles where everyone already agrees. I thrive when expansion is the point. When someone brings something I couldn't have brought. When the conversation goes somewhere none of us could have predicted at the start. Nuance. Oddities. Real friction handled with generosity rather than smoothed away.
I kept thinking I was the problem in those same-y situations. That I was being too difficult, too restless, too much. What I was actually being was myself. And those circles weren't built for that.
What if the situations that have always made you feel flat aren't your failure. What if they were just the wrong format?
Is always being on the outside the thing that makes you see more clearly?
I've been asking myself this and I don't have a complete answer yet.
What I know is that people who have spent a long time on the outside of things develop a very particular kind of observation. You notice what others miss. You read the dynamics of a gathering because you've never been absorbed into one. You understand what it feels like to be overlooked, which means when you actually see someone, they know it.
That's not nothing.
and. exists because I know what it means to have patterns that were formed long before you understood them. Our work is about examining those patterns, the ones that run through leadership, through relationships, through the way you show up. The permanent peripheral person isn't a diagnosis. It might just be a starting point.
Victoria Song's Bending Reality has been a regular re-read with me through all of this. Her argument, drawn from quantum physics and the kind of coaching conversations most people don't get access to, is that the limits we accept about ourselves and what's possible aren't fixed. They're just familiar. The self we've constructed around a lifetime of peripheral experience is a version of us, not the version. That's either terrifying or deeply useful depending on the day. For me, mostly useful. Mostly.
Stephanie Harrison's New Happy cuts right to something I find genuinely hard: that happiness isn't the thing you find when you finally get seen in the right circles. It comes from what you give, from your gifts used in service of others, from unconditional acceptance of people as they are. Not what you need from them. What you bring. I read that and thought, yes, and also, this is a work in progress and I won't pretend otherwise. Both things true at once.
I also want to be honest that acceptance is not the same as resolution. I'm still working out what I want. Which situations I'm building for. Whether I've been chasing visibility in places that were never going to give it to me. That's uncomfortable and live and real.
If you've always felt like you just missed the memo everyone else got, this one's for you.
If you've been in the room but not of the room for as long as you can remember, I want you to know the research is very clear: what you've felt is not a character flaw. It is a human pain response to a human need going unmet. Your nervous system is not being dramatic. It is doing its job.
The situations where you feel genuinely in it exist. They are not mythological. The people who see you are real. The pattern can be examined.
and. maybe, just maybe, the fact that you've never quite fitted the circles you've been trying to fit is less about you being wrong and more about you being specific. That's different. That's worth something.
That's the whole point of the work we do. Start at andcoachme.com or go straight to finding your patterns, your leadership DNA at andcoachme.app.
If you're in the middle of this and need something to read
These are the books sitting on my table right now, just finished. All of them feed into this, some directly, some sideways, some in the way that good books do where you don't realise until three days later that something shifted.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Train About the moments we miss while we're busy being present in the wrong way. Read it slowly. Find it here
Dawn French, Enough About assumption, death, and how little we know about what the people we love actually need. Sharp and funny and then suddenly not. Find it here
A re-read …Victoria Song, Bending Reality On consciousness, self, quantum thinking and what becomes possible when you stop accepting the version of yourself you've been handed. WSJ bestseller. Find it here
Read and read well thumbed… ,Stephanie Harrison, New Happy: Getting happiness right in a world that's got it wrong The research case for happiness through giving rather than getting. Harder to live than it sounds. Worth the discomfort. Find it here
Ilona Bannister, Five Five strangers on a train platform. One dies in five minutes. The reader decides who. It's a 200-page moral experiment in how quickly we judge the strangers we pass every day without a second glance. Absolutely worth it. Find it here
Research references
1. Williams, K.D. (2007). Ostracism. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 425-452. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085641
2. Williams, K.D. and Nida, S.A. (2022). Ostracism and social exclusion: Implications for separation, social isolation, and loss. Current Opinion in Psychology, 47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101353
3. Eisenberger, N.I., Lieberman, M.D. and Williams, K.D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302, 290-292. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1089134
4. American Psychological Association (2013). Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology citation for Naomi Eisenberger. https://www.psych.ucla.edu/faculty-page/neisenbe
5. Eisenberger, N.I. Social Pain. Edge.org. https://www.edge.org/conversation/naomi_eisenberger-social-pain
6. Baumeister, R.F. and Leary, M.R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
7. Saar-Heiman, Y. et al. (2023). Demographic factors, partial social belonging and psychological resources associated with coping. PLOS ONE. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10106560/
8. Büttner, C.M. and Greifeneder, R. (2025). Coping with online versus offline exclusion: Ostracism context affects individuals' coping intentions. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2025.00089 / Albath, E.A. et al. (2025). Online ostracism, depression and anxiety. Journal of Affective Disorders, 380, 696-703.
9. Meyer, M.L., Williams, K.D. and Eisenberger, N.I. (2015). Why Social Pain Can Live On: Different Neural Mechanisms Are Associated with Reliving Social and Physical Pain. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0128294
10. Janis, I.L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Houghton Mifflin. https://www.britannica.com/science/groupthink
11. Page, S.E. (2017). The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176888/the-diversity-bonus
Debbie Halls-Evans is co-founder of and., a global coaching company working with leaders and founders who want to examine their patterns and thrive. Find out more at andcoachme.com and find your leadership DNA at andcoachme.app
